(Photo: Kleiner Perkins)

Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao, who made headlines last year for suing the company in a widely publicized gender discrimination suit, is gainfully employed once more. After reportedly being fired from KPCB in October 2012, she has now taken a gig at community site Reddit, where she'll be "helping us build strategic partnerships that benefit the community."

Reddit announced the hiring in a blog post published to its site by CEO Yishan Wong. In the post, Mr. Wong states that Ms. Pao has been a "formal and informal advisor to reddit for more than a year." Reddit's general manager Erik Martin said that though Ms. Pao was an advisor, she did not formally invest in Reddit through Kleiner Perkins.

When last we heard from Ms. Pao, she wrote on the question and answer site Quora that she had been fired from KPCB:

“I have been terminated from my job at KPCB. On Monday afternoon, senior management told me to clean out my office, leave, and not come back.

Thank you, Quora community, for your support.”

It's interesting to note that Ms. Pao, who is embroiled in a gender discrimination suit, has opted to work for a community whose relationship to women is rather hostile, but Mr. Martin said Ms. Pao's current legal matters had no bearing either way on the company's decision to hire her. "Ellen is extremely qualified," he told Betabeat.

For its part, Reddit's small team employs a fair amount of women, including Jena Donlin, its senior manager of business operations, and community manager Alex Angel. Mr. Martin said that nine out of 25 of the staff are women.

@dawnsiff #VineResume Why you should hire me, in 6 seconds! vine.co/v/b6wxtwrwP7P

— Dawn Siff (@dawnsiff) February 20, 2013

Don't do this.

Please.

This is worse even than Instagram resumes and Pinterest resumes.

Betabeat is here to help stop this social media montrosity before it starts. Here's how you can keep Vine resumes from becoming a thing.

1. Don't make Vine resumes.

2. Discourage anyone with "new media" in their Twitter bio from downloading Vine.

3. After you are done reading this post, forget anyone ever Vined a resume.

This has been a public service announcement.

As for the award-winning Ms. Siff, let us direct you to her actual resume instead.

Job fair lines in Midtown from 2009 (Photo: wsws.org)

Wired.com published an interesting piece last week under the headline "Silicon Valley Creating Jobs, But Not For Everyone." The article looked at how the Valley's unemployment rate has ballooned beyond the national average--up to 8.8 percent in June--despite the growing number of jobs in the tech sector.

Estimates show a similar pattern in New York City. In June, the city's unemployment jumped to 10 percent, the same abysmal peak we hit in the recession three years ago, even as employment in the tech sector grew 30 percent between 2005 and 2010. 

The growing ranks of jobless New Yorkers makes it hard to pity Silicon Alley's hiring woes. Not that you'd know it by talking to them. Today, the Daily News trots out the umpteenth article about six-figure salaries and the difficulty in finding engineering talent.

The paper says starting salaries for web developers are around $65,000 without a college degree, with more experienced devs commanding compensation north of $100,000. Betabeat found even higher numbers when we dug into the recruiting problem last year.

But one of the Daily News sources sound a little tone deaf as to how those numbers might appear to his fellow residents:

"I get so frustrated. I hear people say the job market is bad," said Gabriel Shaoolian, CEO of Blue Fountain Media, a web design and digital marketing company in Manhattan.

"I say, 'Really? I have the opposite problem.'"

Somehow we imagine the job market is filled with people much more frustrated than Mr. Shaoolian.

(Photo: NSA)

DEF CON, which is the world's largest hacker conference that's been around since the heady dot-com days, is a fertile ground for good ol' fashioned startup poaching. But it looks like citizens of Startupland hankering for engineering talent might have a new competitor, 'cuz you know who else is looking to swipe some hardcore hackers for their employee roster? The National Security Agency. Amurrica!

After sending its chief to the conference, the NSA has created a special Careers page for DEF CON attendees with the hopes that it can lure some talented hackers towards a cushy government gig. But, don't think you're guaranteed a job as a computer hacking spy just because you showed up to DEF CON. They have some pretty stringent guidelines for who exactly they're looking for:

• You won Capture the Flag, Mystery Challenge or any other DEF CON^® challenge.
• You have a thing for the pleasantries of a full-time job.
• You work or consult for a security company but want to relocate to the front lines of cyber operations.
• Even if you didn't win a black Über badge, as long as you held your own at DEF CON^®, we want to talk to you

Alright, we suppose "holding your own" is a pretty broad requirement. But you do have to be a U.S. citizen. The one good thing is that they seem to be unfazed by those of you with a red X or two on your permanent record. "If you have a few, shall we say, indiscretions in your past, don't be alarmed. You shouldn't automatically assume you won't be hired. If you're really interested, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot."

Admitting to indiscretions in a job interview with the NSA? Guys, that's how they get you. *dons tinfoil hat*

(Photo: Facebook)

Ever since its bungled IPO, Facebook has grown increasingly serious about snatching top engineering talent for its sprawling compound. The company has even begun plucking Wall Street engineers from their siloed banking institutions and putting them to work cranking out PHP. In fact, it appears the company is growing so desperate for engineers that they've compiled a little cheat sheet that can enlighten any potential applicants on how to nab a Facebook job.

Today, engineer Carlos Bueno published a note to the Facebook Engineering page entitled, "Get that job at Facebook." Subtle!

"Interviewing for a technical job is hard, and so is being the interviewer," he wrote. "You want to get that engineering job at Facebook, and we want to hire the best people (you!). Knowing what to expect on both sides can go a long way toward making the process work better."

What follows is a handy guide to nailing an engineering job at Facebook, complete with detailed accounts of the process (phoner, slew of in-person interviews, offer), recommendations on what the company looks for in a candidate (culture fit, people with all kinds of coding chops, good problem visualization), and tips for preparing for a Facebook interview.

It's all very Sparknotes of them. We get the feeling your engineering professor probably wouldn't approve.

Given the dearth of qualified engineers in New York (and Facebook's propensity for hoarding them), an online job tool geared solely towards programmers and designers was more or less inevitable. Enter Path.to, a Florida-based online job company that announced today that it is expanding to New York, along with Chicago and Boston.

Path.to describes itself as an "eHarmony for jobs," but if you can forgive them for that PR fumble, the company's approach to hiring is actually quite novel. "We try to get a deeper understanding of job seekers, life situation, personality, their experience and education, as well as their passions and interests," Path.to's CEO Darren Bounds told Betabeat by phone last week. "We pair that with a better understanding of a business and their culture and what it takes to be successful in a particular role. We combine those two things and sprinkle algorithmic sugar on top, and we come up with a Path.to score. It's a 0-99 measure of how compatible we feel a person is with a specific role at a specific company."

Prior to their New York launch, Path.to was located primarily in the Bay Area, where it accumulated over 10,000 users and 200 startups, including Vimeo, Gilt and The Onion. And the price to post a job ad is pretty affordable: Businesses can begin hosting their jobs for free for 90 days. After that, each position costs $500, but there's a discount for renewal and volume. "We could probably charge a lot more, but we don’t want to right now," added Mr. Bounds. "We’re just trying to provide a lot of value."

Along with the expansion to these three new cities, Path.to has announced three new features, including a visual social portfolio which aggregates contributions and actions on networks like Forrst and Github. The second is immediate candidate recommendations, derived from Path.to's algorithm, that serves a company with the most compatible candidates available for a position. The third new feature is the ability for companies to create public business profile pages advertising their open positions and showcasing aspects of company culture.

Mr. Bounds is excited about the company's launch in New York, which he says Path.to identified as the "second most high-demand market in terms of business." Path.to is currently hiring, but since the company is based in Jacksonville, it can't use Path.to to fill those roles.

"We can’t post our own jobs in our system, which is kind of ironic," Mr. Bounds admitted with a laugh.

The company is based in Irvine, California, but recently opened an office in New York. With the office expansion of companies like Google and Twitter, says CyberCoders CTO Matt Miller, “We are seeing a significant demand for various types of web development, as well as candidates who manage projects and the sales team to support those efforts.” Startups are unlikely to ask a staffing firm for help with hiring up, but their numbers offer a nice overview of coveted jobs and compensation.

Based on data from job postings, client input, and salary ranges from its database of candidates, the company says the top ten tech jobs in New York City for 2012 are:

1. PHP Developer, $96,071
2. Sales Engineer, $106,500
3. Java Developer, $104,500
4. Network Engineer, $103,750
5. Sales Manager, $86,250
6. Project Manager, $78,333
7. Ruby Developer, $106,667
8. Python Developer, $103,333
9. Mobile/Web Engineer, $85,000
10. Product Manager, $97,500

If you're going after New York's most poachable technophiles, of course, you're gonna need to up the ante.

Like Steve Ballmer on a bad day.

Thanksgiving marks the start of tech's most intense hiring season, as promising computer science students start looking for summer jobs and internships. Software veteran Joel Spolsky was kind enough to let us print some of his thoughts on how to avoid getting stuck at your second choice. The original post appears on his blog, here.

If you’re a college student applying for jobs or summer internships, you’re at something of a disadvantage when it comes to negotiation. That’s because the recruiter does these negotiations for a living, while you’re probably doing it for the first time.

I want to warn you about one trick that’s very common with on-campus recruiters: the cynical “exploding offer.”

Here’s what happens. You get invited to interview at a good company. There’s an on-campus interview; maybe you even fly off to the company HQ for another round of interviews and cocktails. You ace the interview, of course. They make you an offer.

“That sounds great,” you say.

“So, when can you let us know?”

“Well,” you tell them, “I have another interview coming up in January. So I’ll let you know right after that.”

“Oh,” they say. “That might be a problem. We really have to know by December 31st. Can you let us know by December 31st?”

Tada! The magnificent “exploding offer.”

Here’s what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, well, that’s a good company, not my first choice, but still a good offer, and I’d hate to lose this opportunity. And you don’t know for sure if your number one choice would even hire you. So you accept the offer at your second-choice company and never go to any other interviews.

And now, you lost out. You’re going to spend several years of your life in some cold dark cubicle with a crazy boss who couldn’t program a twenty out of an ATM, while some recruiter somewhere gets a $1000 bonus because she was better at negotiating than you were.

Career counselors know this, and almost universally prohibit it. Every campus recruiting center has rules requiring every company that recruits on campus to give students a reasonable amount of time to make a decision and consider other offers.

The trouble is, the recruiters at the second-rate companies don’t give a shit. They know that you’re a college kid and you don’t want to mess things up with your first real job and you’re not going to call them on it. They know that they’re a second-rate company: good enough, but nobody’s dream job, and they know that they can’t get first-rate students unless they use pressure tactics like exploding offers.

And the worst thing that career centers can do is kick them off campus. Big whoop. So they hold their recruiting sessions and interviews in a hotel next to the campus instead of at the career center.

Here’s your strategy, as a student, to make sure you get the job you want.

1. Schedule your interviews as close together as possible.

2. If you get an exploding offer from a company that’s not your first choice, push back. Say, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to be able to give you an answer until January 14th. I hope that’s OK.” Almost any company, when pressed, will give you a chance to compare offers. Don’t worry about burning bridges or pissing anyone off. Trust me on this one: there’s not a single hiring manager in the world who wants to hire you but would get mad just because you’re considering other offers. It actually works the other way. When they realize you’re in demand, they’ll want you more.

In the rare case that they don’t accept that, accept the exploding offer at the last minute, but go to the other interviews anyway. Don’t cash any signing bonus checks, don’t sign anything, just accept the offer verbally. If you get a better offer later, call back the slimy company and tell them you changed your mind. Look, Microsoft hires thousands of college kids every year. If one of them doesn’t show up I think they’ll survive. Anyway, since we instituted that 13th amendment thing, they can’t force you to work for them.

If you do find yourself forced to renege on an offer, be classy about it. Don’t do this unless you are absolutely forced to because they literally refused to give you a chance to hear from your first choice company. And let them know right away you’re not going to take the offer, so they have a chance to fill the position with someone else.

Campus recruiters count on student’s high ethical standards. Almost all students think, “gosh, I promised I’ll go work for them, and I’m going to keep my promise.” And that’s great, that’s a commendable attitude. Definitely. But unethical recruiters that don’t care about your future and don’t want you to compare different companies are going to take advantage of your ethics so they can get their bonus. And that’s just not fair.

So, each year every company with more than 100 people in their workforce has to tell the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission who they're hiring and why. This helps to ensure that America isn't racist or unfair, even though it is, but it's one of the better (read: only) solutions we have to the problem, so, yeah.

Some reporters, like Julianne Pepitone of CNN Money, wanted to know what this information looks like for tech companies in Silicon Valley using the Freedom of Information Act, which allows us bastard reporters to find out things on official papers that should be public but aren't because someone wants to keep them not public.

Guess what happened? The EEOC blocked it. They called it private data. Pepitone's FOIA filing is still pending with the Department of Labor. Another reporter from the Mercury News tried to pull a fast one with this silly "race" issue thing on these companies last year, who responded in kind by lawyering up against this pesky reporter and his FOIA requests.

Some companies have actually handed this information over voluntarily. The good/transparent guys?

• Microsoft
• Dell
• Ingram Micro
• Cisco Systems
• eBay
• AMD
• Sanmina
• Sun Microsystems
• and Intel.

Guess who didn't hand it over?

• Apple
• Google
• Yahoo
• Netflix
• Oracle
• Hewlett-Packard
• and Applied Materials.

And what can we learn from what little information we're actually allowed to have on the matter?

Among American adults age 25 to 64 -- typically considered the working-age population -- around 11% are African-American, but black workers account for just 3.5% of Intel's domestic workforce and 1.3% of its top officials. Hispanics are similarly under-represented: They make up nearly 15% of the American workforce, but only 8% of Intel's workforce and 3% of its management ranks. In contrast, Asian workers -- a category that includes those of Indian descent -- have made strong inroads in the tech industry. They account for less than 5% of the U.S. working population but hold nearly 20% of the jobs at the companies CNNMoney surveyed.

Mind you, that is data from a company that is okay with having their numbers out there because—their words—"relevant for the country and for our industry" because "companies can move the needle only by coming together and talking about it."

Correct! And if Intel is willing to share their numbers—which by no means make Intel out to be The Electric Company—what can Apple, Google, and Netflix be hiding?

Probably nothing that would surprise anyone, and maybe something that'd have some people upset, but nothing that'd have anyone reading their iPhones the riot act.

But it's the simple act of obsfuscating efforts to procure this information that not only makes them so obviously suspect, but inherently convicts them of a huge problem in the technology sector that will continue to remain a sore point of contention for many of its most important talent, which goes without mentioning the industry at-large: an unwillingness to discuss these issues, as if they don't exist.

They do. Steve Jobs' war against pornography didn't make pornography go away, but did create a talking point for criticizing Steve Jobs' fundamental views on censorship. In the same way, by brushing it under the rug, these tech companies are continuing to certify the legitimacy of a problem that (A) is beneficial to them to address and (B) will eventually come to a head, in a way beyond their control, that will be the opposite of beneficial to them. Why wait until we get there?

Tough boots to fill.

The hunt is on. Last week, we broke the news that Andy Weissman was making the leap from betaworks to Union Square Ventures, formalizing the marriage of a Silicon Alley Power Couple that would have made a big splash in the Vows column, if only the New York tech scene had its own Wedding section.

Since Mr. Weissman will be out by the end of the month, betaworks isn't wasting any time looking for "a new member to our team to help us with our seed-stage investments," according to the listing on its careers page. In an email to Betabeat, John Borthwick wrote:

"Our investments activities at betaworks are and always have been tightly woven with our operating companies. We are makers.  We build stuff and invest in and around the areas we build.  Thats what we have always done and that is what we are continuing to do ..."

Indeed, we've been told that a number of the big deals at betaworks were sourced from the operational side, including Tumblr, Tweetdeck, and Groupon. Following that arrangement, the new hire will be responsible for "responding to inquiries, keeping track of potential investments, meeting with companies, contributing to decisions about investments, attending events and supporting our current portfolio."

Applicants might want to brush up on their check-in history as one of the four test questions is: "Why do you believe people use Foursquare? What would you do to improve it?" If you need some help answering that, you know where to find us.